Merry Christmas to all!

Brrrrrrrrrr

Beautiful fall morning in northeast Iowa

Combined 75 acres yesterday. Average dry yield was 209 vs 185 last year.

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Harvest has officially started for me

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Not so joyous start to the harvest.

Was supposed to start combining today, go out to finish opening up the bins and turns out my dry auger blew over in the wind yesterday.

Gonna be a long weekend.

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Office is framed up

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Looks like we may get wet

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So far in IN what you see will be what you get.

The corn northwest if INDY is much more mature compared to what we sampled in ohio yesterday where corn was in early milk stage and therefore many of the samples were very optomistic for ohio.

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Can you sy variable?

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New shop is coming along

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Pulled a few ears this morning

Finally back from Alaska late last night, feels good to be home.

No big surprise that this mornings drive to look at my fields was disappointing and I lowered my yield expectations to 185 for my farm average(which is my 5-yr average and the same farm average as last year). 2 weeks ago I was hoping to set a new high for a farm average corn yield (200+). Oh well, it could be worse.


Beans are looking really good so far, just starting to fill pods.

Feeling a little better

After further investigation, so far this incident is isolated to my refuge in one field. 25 acres total. I hope I have time to check the rest of my fields today before leaving for AK tomorrow.

Rootworm silk feeding ruined my pollination

This is isolated to my refuge (20%) corn so far, but most my other varieties have not gotten to brown silk like this one has.

I dont know what to say other than this is a bad deal. I'm in shock. Plant health in my area is a 10.....and I would roughly estimate yield loss around 20-30% minimum.

Flying on some fungicide

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Early hybrid at blister

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Pollination isn't completely over yet.

This is a pic from a 102 day corn planted around May 10th. I thought it would be done by now, but stand corrected.

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Pollinated ear of corn

A brief explanation of pollination is the bottom end of the ear sends its silks out first, followed by the rest of the ear. Once the silk receives its pollen, the silk detachs from the kernel and turn a brown in color. In this picture you can see roughly 2/3 of the ear has pollinated and looks (as of now) that it has done so uniformly (a good thing).

This is one of the first fields I had tassel, so I hope the rest go this good.

It was darn hot today with air temps at 95F and 75% humidity making it feels like close to 120F.

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Whole area is about 95% tasseled

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Most of the corn is tasseling

My slowest hybrid to tassel is my refuge, which is due to very heavy rootworm pressure.

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Heat is usually a good thing

However, we have only missed the last 2 rains and already corn is showing stress on the lighter ground.
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